Power outages unbalanced
Why some faced longer blackouts in storm than others is a lingering question
Kay Swint went without power for 53 hours during last month’s winter storm, forcing the retired nursing director to crank up her gas fireplace, layer on two pairs of socks and go to bed in her son’s sleeping bag to stay warm.
As the polar vortex plunged Houston into frigid darkness, the temperature inside Swint’s 1957 Houston home fell to 43 degrees, bursting six pipes in her attic and saddling the 69-year-old retiree with a $2,500 repair bill.
Across town, Deep Datta lost power in his apartment just once, for all of three hours. When the power and heat went out Feb. 17, the 27-yearold environmental engineer said he put on a jacket when it got a little chilly inside.
“I know for some people, it was more of a life-threatening situation,” Datta said. “For me, it wasn’t as bad. It was kind of an inconvenience. I was fairly comfortable the whole week.”
The starkly different experiences of Swint and Datta highlight a critical question still lingering from the recent power crisis: Why didn’t rotating outages rotate? The rolling blackouts ordered by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to stabilize the power grid were supposed to last no more than 45 minutes and be spread equally among customers, but some Texans were without electricity for three days, ERCOT said, while others never lost power.
The inability or failure to rotate power outages equitably meant the effects of the ice, snow and frigid temperatures were not shared equally — to devastating effect.
Dozens of Texans died during hours-long blackouts, including an 11-yearold boy in Conroe and a 95-year-old man in Houston who were found dead in their freezing homes. In Sugar Land, three children and their grandmother trying to keep warm by their fireplace died in a house fire.
In Galveston, a 75-yearold veteran, down to his last oxygen bottle after his electric-powered oxygen tank inside his house ran out, went to his truck to get the bottle and died in the cold. Hundreds of Texans were treated for carbon monoxide poisoning after resorting to running cars, portable generators, gas stoves and barbecue grills inside their homes and garages.
Homes, schools and businesses across the state suffered billions of dollars in property damage from frozen and broken water pipes. Some insurance estimates forecast that the winter storm could be the costliest natural disaster in Texas history, possibly surpassing the $125 billion in damage from Hurricane Harvey.
Much of the human suffering and misery during the storm was caused by the inability or failure to rotate outages, suggested ERCOT CEO Bill Magness, whom the council’s board fired last week. The amount of power that utilities had to cut — known as shedding load — to offset the huge loss of electricity supplies was so great that the outages could not be rotated without risking the stability of the grid.
“When we had a lot of load shed, some customers were stuck in that load shed for the entire time,”
Magness told ERCOT board members recently. “That’s where so much of the harm and damage came from.”
Carrying the load
Centerpoint Energy, a regulated utility, owns transmission lines and distributes power to homes, public buildings and businesses in the Houston area. The utility’s distribution charges account for half or more of electric bills; the balance is the cost of electricity sold by retailers such as Reliant, Griddy or Discount Power.
Centerpoint said it began preparing for the extreme weather Thursday, Feb. 11, three days before the storm hit. ERCOT forecast that electricity demand would hit a record of about 75,000 megawatts, nearly 14 percent higher than the previous winter peak of 65,915 megawatts set in January 2018.
Supply and demand
must stay balanced on the grid, or else it can collapse, knocking out power everywhere. ERCOT on Feb. 13 said it expected up to a 7,500-megawatt shortfall in electricity supplies during the storm, warning utilities that rotating power outages could be necessary.
Centerpoint is responsible for shedding about 25 percent of the excess load on the grid when electricity demand exceeds power generation. Only Oncor Electric Delivery in Dallas is responsible for a larger share, about 36 percent.
With temperatures plunging and power plants struggling to keep up with surging demand, ERCOT began to mandate rotating outages in the early morning of Feb. 15. By sunrise that day, ERCOT had ordered 16,500 megawatts to be shed by utilities across the state, representing more than one-third of the average load on the grid in
2020. Centerpoint was responsible for shedding 4,100 megawatts in the Houston area.
The orders to cut power came so rapidly, Centerpoint said, that it could not rotate customer outages automatically.
“The amount of power available from power generation companies was significantly reduced in a short amount of time,” a spokeswoman said, “preventing outages from being safely rotated without risking the integrity of the grid.”
Dark freeze
Centerpoint activated its Incident Command Center, which it would operate 24 hours a day for the entire week. The company deployed 2,500 employees and contractors on 16-hour shifts to handle calls and restore power to customers.
The utility said it reached out to industrial and commercial customers, requesting them to conserve as much power as possible. At the same time, the company said, it isolated circuits to maintain power for the Texas Medical Center, other hospitals and critical services such as water, sewer and emergency response.
Centerpoint said it sent crews to neighborhoods and began manually rotating power around midday Feb. 15 in an effort to spread outages while preserving the safety and stability of the grid .
By that evening, ERCOT ordered 20,000 megawatts of power to be shed across Texas, including about 4,950 megawatts in the Houston area. More than 1.4 million Centerpoint customers would be without power for an additional 24 hours until crews were able to restore power gradually. Nearly all customers had power by Saturday, Feb. 20.
Outage equity
Centerpoint said it received 59 orders from ERCOT to cut power, and it complied to the best of its ability and as safely as possible. Some 89 percent of Centerpoint’s 2.7 million customer locations in the greater Houston area experienced a power outage during the storm. Some customers had longer outages because of the power shortage, but others because of downed power lines and damaged equipment.
“We were focused on restoring power throughout our entire 5,000square-mile service territory as soon as power generation was available,” a Centerpoint spokeswoman said.
Colin Leyden, the Environmental Defense Fund’s director of regulatory and legislative affairs for energy, said he lost power in his Austin home around 2 a.m. Feb. 15 and went without power until around 1 a.m. three days later. Temperatures fell into the mid-40s inside his home.
“I would have done almost anything to get three to six hours of power to get our house warm,” Leyden said. “And I’m in a fortunate circumstance. I can’t imagine what it was like for someone who didn’t have a car to warm up in or insulation in the walls. It was a nightmare for me, but it would have been pure hell for someone in that situation.”
In the aftermath of the power failure, the Environmental Defense Fund issued policy recommendations for Texas lawmakers, including for state regulators to investigate ways to rotate outages equitably when needed. Leyden said he recommends utilities install more circuits that can shut off downtown office towers without affecting nearby hospitals and government buildings. In addition, Leyden said Texas should require the installation of remote switches that would allow utilities to flip circuits on and off without having to send workers do so manually.
“I have to assume that rotating outages would have led to much less tragedy,” Leyden said. “Rolling blackouts are not ideal, but they save lives and they save property.”
Swint would know. After losing power, she turned on her natural gas fireplace to keep her husband, daughter, son-in-law and three grandsons warm. But it had been so long since her family used it, they forgot to open the flue venting the fumes out of the house.
It wasn’t until the house got hot a few hours later when it dawned on them that they were in danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. They quickly opened the vents, and layered on more clothing to ride out the 53-hour blackout.
“We could have easily had an incident,” Swint said. “Luckily for us, we figured it out before it was too late.”